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They talked about the imminent flooding of New Orleans and the death and destruction to follow on the Weather Channel for 2 days leading up to Katrina... pardon me for not giving a if it was caused by a "breach" or a "overtopping".
No, it depends on what your definition of "overtopping" and "breach" are.
They talked about the imminent flooding of New Orleans and the death and destruction to follow on the Weather Channel for 2 days leading up to Katrina... pardon me for not giving a if it was caused by a "breach" or a "overtopping".
And the President pleaded with local and state officials to order a mandatory evacuation on the Saturday preceding landfall.
And, the imminency of the flooding was based on a cat 4 or 5 landfall, not a cat 3.
What was the strength of the hurricane when this tape was made on Aug. 28?
I have no idea.
http://www.wunderground.com/hurricane/at200512.asp03 GMT 08/28/05 25.0N 86.2W 115 939 Category 3 Hurricane
06 GMT 08/28/05 25.1N 86.8W 145 935 Category 4 Hurricane
09 GMT 08/28/05 25.4N 87.4W 145 935 Category 4 Hurricane
12 GMT 08/28/05 25.7N 87.7W 160 908 Category 5 Hurricane
15 GMT 08/28/05 26.0N 88.1W 175 907 Category 5 Hurricane
21 GMT 08/28/05 26.9N 89.0W 165 902 Category 5 Hurricane
03 GMT 08/29/05 27.6N 89.4W 160 904 Category 5 Hurricane
Bush lying or not lying or flooding being caused by breaching or overtopping is rather irrelevant, so I'd expect it to be the topic of discussion between the partisan Tweedle Dees and Tweedle Dums of this forum...
What's telling is the apparent lack of concern from Bush when told of "The Big One." That makes twice that Bush has immediately responded to being told of a major disaster on American soil with a blank stare. Plain and simple, the guy isn't a good leader.
The Great Leader at work during disaster.
Yeah, tell that to the kids who have lost their parents, wifes and husbands who have lost their spouses, and relatives and friends who have lost friends and loved-ones in Iraq. It's important to establish a pattern of deception for some people to finally wake up.Bush lying or not lying...is rather irrelevant
So did Mayor Nagin and Governor Blanco, so what's your point?And the President pleaded with local and state officials to order a mandatory evacuation on the Saturday preceding landfall.
There it is at 1:59 of the tape. Dubya reassuring State and local officials that the FEDS are 'fully prepared' to not only help during the storm, but also to move in all the resources and assets they have at their disposal after the storm to deal with the loss of property and the loss of life.
now comes the blanco tape.. lol... people need to learn that govt. can F**K anything up.. but I guess some people still believe govt. is the answer for everything...
WASHINGTON - As Hurricane Katrina loomed over the Gulf Coast, federal and state officials agonized over the threat to levees and lives. Hours after the catastrophic storm hit, Louisiana's governor believed New Orleans' crucial floodwalls were still intact.
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"We keep getting reports in some places that maybe water is coming over the levees," Gov. Kathleen Blanco said shortly after noon on Aug. 29 — the day the storm hit the Gulf coast.
"We heard a report unconfirmed, I think, we have not breached the levee," she said on a video of the day's disaster briefing that was obtained Thursday night by The Associated Press. "I think we have not breached the levee at this time."
In fact, the National Weather Service received a report of a levee breach and issued a flash-flood warning as early as 9:12 a.m. that day, according to the White House's formal recounting of events the day Katrina struck.
Not until the day after Katrina roared ashore did the White House confirm that its surge had, in fact, breached the levees — a delay that critics charge held up repair efforts and allowed the deadly flooding to worsen.
The rampant confusion is highlighted in the two Federal Emergency Management Agency video briefings, obtained this week by the AP, revealing disaster plans and damage reports detailed by officials as the storm smashed into the coast.
The tapes — and particularly the pre-storm Aug. 28 video that includes an appearance by President Bush — prompted widespread criticism by Republican and Democratic lawmakers alike who said the government should have been better prepared for the storm that flooded New Orleans and killed more than 1,300 people.
That video "makes it perfectly clear once again that this disaster was not out of the blue or unforeseeable," Sen. David Vitter, R-La., said Thursday. "It was not only predictable, it was actually predicted. That's what made the failures in response — at the local, state and federal level — all the more outrageous."
After AP's broadcast this week showing some of the Katrina briefings, the Homeland Security Department refused Thursday to release videos from five other days immediately before and after Katrina hit. The agency insisted last year — in response to AP's requests under the Freedom of Information Act — there were no such tapes. Now it acknowledges more tapes exist.
"We do have tapes," DHS spokesman Russ Knocke said. "We have the tapes from the v-tels (video teleconferences), and we've provided the transcripts — they've been in the public domain for months."
In the Aug. 29 video, Blanco is not shown in the video but is heard as a disembodied voice speaking from an emergency operations center in Baton Rouge, La., to 11 people sitting around a table at the headquarters of the Federal Emergency Management Agency in Washington. She sounds uncertain about the reliability of her information and cautioned that the situation "could change."
Blanco spokeswoman Denise Bottcher said Thursday that "our people on the ground were telling us that there could be overtopping and breaching, but it was hard to tell" by the noon briefing.
Another official who was heard but not seen on the video was then-Federal Emergency Management Agency Director Michael Brown, who was at the federal emergency operations center in Baton Rouge, La. He implored officials to "push the envelope as far as you can," noting that he had already spoken to Bush twice that day and described the president as "very, very interested in this situation."
Brown has criticized the White House for miscommunications that led to some delays. But he said in an interview Thursday he never blamed Bush. He also said there was confusion among officials over whether levees were breached at the time of the noon video conference call. But he said he was convinced of the breach by 1 p.m.
The video shows weather forecasters predicting the storm's path and also briefly cuts to White House deputy chief of staff Joe Hagin asking Blanco about the status of the levees and the situation at the Superdome in New Orleans.
By that time, an estimated 15,000 evacuees had gathered at the stadium, where food and water was beginning to run out, said Col. Jeff Smith, Louisiana's emergency preparedness deputy director. Smith also reported up to 10 feet of flooding in neighboring St. Bernard Parish and that there were 45 patients on life-support at one area hospital that lost its power.
Still, "the coordination and support we are getting from FEMA has just been outstanding," Smith said.
Mississippi officials were less complimentary, reporting significant damage to hospitals, flooded and collapsed emergency operations centers and people trapped on the roofs or in the attacks who were begging for help.
The Homeland Security Department played down the new video. Knocke said it "reveals nothing new because the transcript had previously been released."
The new video came to light a day after the AP obtained footage of an Aug. 28 briefing — the day before Katrina hit — that showed officials warning the storm might breach levees, put lives at risk in the Superdome and overwhelm rescuers. Bush and Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff were among those on the videotaped call.
Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid of Nevada said it "confirms what we have suspected all along," charging that Bush administration officials have "systematically misled the American people."
Reid and House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi of California renewed their calls for an independent commission to investigate the federal response to the hurricane. The House and Senate have conducted separate investigations of the federal response, and the White House did its own investigation.
Truer words have never been spoken in the SpursTalk Political Forum
Yep, Bush lied, need a investigation. So says Reid. Here is another article on
the Governor of Louisana and the flooding.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...03-02-21-00-56
In the hours after Katrina hit, communication at the State level was almost non-existant and what there was was spotty at best. So it's not surprising to learn that first reports by Governor Blanco were that the levees had not been breached when in fact they were, however, this lame attempt to once again blame the Governor for the FEDS mishandling of the levee breach crisis in no way minimizes the fact that Dubya is caught on tape reassuring both State and local officials that 'the FEDS' were prepared to react to any crisis Katrina may bring along the gulf coast region, which as we learned later, clearly wasn't the case.
Also, this AP story is filled with so many qualifiers it should be classified as a opt piece rather than serious reporting. Clearly, someone at the FED level leaned on the AP to help diffuse the outrage over the FEMA shortcomings brought to light by the AP tape which was initially cloaked under 'national security' privileges by the FEDS. They knew they were at fault and tried to hide it. Blanco and Nagin never tried to hide anything.
The blame goes all around, nobody can deny that.
But as irrefutable proof of indefensible dubya/DHS/FEMA total up becomes available (no doubt, the story of the horrible disaster aka "the dubya/ head/Repug years", comes out), all the right-wingers can do is blame state/city.
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